Aleksandrinke as the Carriers of Honour of National Community in the Karol Pečnik's Post from Egypt (1897)

ABSTRACTThe paper examines a letter by physician Karol Pečnik from Alexandria, which was published in three issues of the Goriška newspaper Soča in 1897 and focuses to a great extent on Slovenian emigrants in Egypt, the so-called aleksandrinke. Pečnik’s attitude towards migration is not a priori negative, and in contrast to other newspaper reporting on aleksandrinke in those times, moral denunciation is not his primary concern. His main focus is (nationally conscious) women who, while living in a foreign, urban environment, are in great danger of falling through the nationalist dragnet. His letter shows that wo­men who were exposed to foreign elements (at the edge of the “national body”) constituted a potential threat of national contamination and that they were an important element of national(istic) thinking.KEY WORDS: Karol Pečnik, Egypt, aleksandrinke, female migration, nationalism

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SUMMARYALEKSANDRINKE AS THE CARRIERS OF HONOUR OF NATIONAL COMMUNITY IN THE KAROL PEČNIK'S POST FROM EGYPT (1897)Jernej MLEKUŽ

The paper examines a letter by physician Karol Pečnik from Alexandria, which was published in three issues of the Goriška newspaper Soča in 1897 and focuses to a great extent on Slovenian emigrants in Egypt, the so-called aleksandrinke – women and girls primarily from the Goriška region who migrated before and after the First World War to what was at the time the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, where they worked as nannies, maids, au pairs and wet nurses. Pečnik’s attitude towards migration is not a priori negative, and in contrast to other newspaper reporting on aleksandrinke in those times, moral denunciation is not his primary concern. Pečnik is of course a man of his time. His writing on aleksandrinke reveals numerous issues and dilemmas of the day: migration, the placing of women outside of the family sphere and their emancipation, urbanization and so on. He views all of these phenomena to a significant extent through the lens of patriotism, through the eyes of a community which was thinking more and more nationalistically and which identified with the concept of national honour and purity. This was the time of the rise of nationalist movements and nationalist ideologies throughout Europe, and in the Slovenian case also a time of a sense of a real threat to the nation and fear of Germanization and Italianization. His main preoccupation in the letters is nationally conscious women who in a foreign, urban environment are in great danger of falling through the nationalist dragnet. Pečnik’s letter shows that women who were exposed to foreign elements constituted a potential threat of national contamination and that they were an important element of national(istic) thinking. At the extreme borders of the national body they posed a threat to national purity and honour. Through their (in)decorous conduct, aleksandrinke thus embodied the line demarcating the frontier of the national community.